BlackBerry Storm first impressions

We’ve been throwing out the term iPhone Killer a lot these last, what 16 months. But by and large, nothing’s really come close to meeting the requirements of a jesus phone assassin.

That is until now. I spent more than an hour with the BlackBerry Storm recently and found it to be the most credible challenger to the iPhone. Now it wasn’t like Research in Motion was hurting due to the iPhone. It commanded more than 50 percent of the U.S. smart phone market in the second quarter. But it hasn’t had a touch screen device that really did multimedia and web browsing really well. It didn’t have the cool of Apple’s iPhone 3G.

Research in Motion

Behold the BlackBerry Storm

The Storm brings the cool. Let’s start with, naturally, the screen. It’s not only big (3.25 inches compared to 3.5 inches for the iPhone) and bright (480 x 360) but it it’s also capacitive, meaning it uses the electricity in your finger to help register movement. It’s a more expensive approach than the traditional resistive touch technology found in most iPhone wannabes but it’s a key part of recreating the iPhone’s screen, which is also capacitive.

The swipes and double taps were all very responsive though I would have liked a little more give when spinning through a long menu. But overall, it’s very nice and right there with the iPhone. It also has multi-touch capabilities, though it doesn’t use it for “pinching” maneuvers for expanding pages and pictures. You can use multi-touch to highlight a sentence for cutting and pasting.

But it’s not just recreating the feel of the iPhone. The Storm tries something different. It makes the screen a clickable button. If, for instance, you’re scrolling through e-mails, you’re finger swipes will spin the list up and down and when you rest your finger on a specific message it will highlight that entry. But to open the e-mail or do any other function in other applications, you need to press down on the screen until you hear the click.

It makes your movements a little bit more precise and gives you the reassurance that you’re setting in motion only the things you want. Now, the iPhone has a lot of precision in this way, but it doesn’t provide that tactile feedback and it’s also prone to some errant taps when you’re wheeling around through a menu or panning across a web page.

It also works on the virtual keyboard. I found this to be less of a plus just because a long e-mail message involves a lot of button presses and I don’t think it’s as necessary if you have a good auto-correct and spell check software, which the Storm and iPhone both have. In some ways, the Storm’s auto-correct is better than the iPhone’s because it not only anticipates what you’re writing but if you accidentally add a few letters to a misspelled word, it still offers to correctly fix it for you. The iPhone’s predictive suggestions go away if you keep adding wrong letters, even if it’s obvious what word you’re trying to spell.

The phone itself maintains almost the same outline of the iPhone though its top and bottom are wedge-like creating a gold bar shape. The phone is heavier and thicker than the iPhone but not so much that it feels like a brick.

The iPhone still has its advantages but the distance has been closed by the Storm. The iPhone 3G has Wi-Fi, it’s got the iTunes system and iPod feel and it has the big App Store filled with applications made specifically for this platform, which has been a huge selling point for the phone.

The Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi. It will offer V Cast Music with Rhapsody soon. And it will also offer a VZ App Zone, a store filled with old BlackBerry apps and new ones made for the Storm. The old apps will need to be rejiggered for the Storm to handle its different input system.

But the Storm has its advantages over the iPhone. It has GPS like the iPhone 3G but it’s got a version that’s precise enough to work with Verizon’s VZ Navigator turn-by-turn direction service. The iPhone GPS is nice and works with Google maps and other apps but it can be a imprecise enough to make turn-by-turn directions unreliable at times. The phone reads Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files but it also allows you to edit them. It also provides instant messaging support for AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and Windows Live Messenger. And it’s got stereo Bluetooth support.

The Storm provides a removable battery, which has 6 hours of talk time. It also comes with 1 gigabyte of onboard storage and a microSD slot that supports up to 16 GB. It has dual microphone technology to hear the ambient sound around you so it can improve your hearing and talking ability in loud areas. The browser supports full HTML and allows you to pan with your finger or use an onscreen cursor that floats above and to the left of your finger. That makes pressing links even easier. The Storm also has a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus, flash and video recording. It does picture messaging, something the iPhone doesn’t do natively though it has a third-party application that handles it. And of course, e-mail, calendaring and security are rock-solid.

For international travelers, the Storm is a true world phone. It can support four bands of EDGE and also HSPA in addition to its two bands of EVDO Rev A. That means it can work in 208 countries including Japan. When you’re in GSM countries, the phone will use an included SIM card.

The iPhone has enjoyed the limelight for a while, but the pack is now right on its tail. I think the Storm, along with the G1 from T-Mobile, HTC and Google in particular should make things very interesting this fall. It’s up to Apple now to push ahead and respond.